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Claude Monet made some thirty paintings of stacks of wheat in a field near his Giverny home in the fall and winter of 1890/91. I can't really rave about them. I think 'ol Claude would have been better served to find another central subject for his reflection of the seasons. Honestly, they make me think of muffins. I expect to see raisons peeking out ... like I said on my homepage, "Great Art Reviewed by the Ignorant".
Monet intended the Stacks of Wheat paintings to function both independently and as parts of a series. He realized that he would have to break up the group when he sold individual canvases, but, before they were dispersed, he wished to exhibit them together.
"Know that I am absorbed by my work," Claude Monet wrote to a friend in 1908. "These landscapes of water and reflections have become an obsession. Indeed, the artist's paintings of water lilies truthfully depict nature. I have spent considerable time on Minnesota lakes, I wonder if he ever tried to portray that band of ripples caused by the wind that always seems to blow across lily pads.
"I love London," Monet wrote. "It is a mass, an ensemble, and it is so simple. Then, in London, what I love, above all, is the fog." So intent was he on capturing gradations of light as it is affected by fog that he undertook about one-hundred canvases. Of these, he finished thirty-seven, completed primarily in his Giverny studio. In this painting, there are obviously a great multitude of people crossing the bridge, but they appear only faintly. Just as in the painting itself, there ghostly forms are long gone from this world.
In 1893, three years after buying property at Giverny, Claude Monet began transforming the marshy ground behind his home into a pond, on the narrow end of which he built a Japanese-style wood bridge. Adding both exotic and domestic plantings, including his famous water lilies, the artist created the garden that would he one of his principal subjects for the rest of his life.
Toulouse-Lautrec was drawn to Montmartre, an area of Paris famous for its bohemian lifestyle and for being the haunt of artists, writers, and philosophers. Throughout his career, which spanned less than 20 years, Toulouse-Lautrec created 737 canvases, 275 watercolors, 363 prints and posters, 5,084 drawings, some ceramic and stained glass work, and an unknown number of lost works. His debt to the Impressionists, in particular the more figurative painters Manet and Degas, is apparent. His style was also influenced by the classical Japanese wood prints which became popular in art circles in Paris. In the works of Toulouse-Lautrec can be seen many parallels to Manet's detached barmaid at A Bar at the Folies-Bergère and the behind-the-scenes ballet dancers of Degas. He excelled at capturing people in their working environment, with the color and the movement of the gaudy night-life present, but the glamour stripped away. He was masterly at capturing crowd scenes in which the figures are highly individualized. At the time that they were painted, the individual figures in his larger paintings could be identified by silhouette alone, and the names of many of these characters have been recorded. His treatment of his subject matter, whether as portraits, scenes of Parisian night-life, or intimate studies, has been described as both sympathetic and dispassionate.
Lautrec populated this scene with portraits of the habitudes and regulars of the dance hall, hiding himself (the diminutive figure in the center background) accompanied by his cousin and frequent companion, the physician Gabriel Tapie de Celeyran. The woman on the right is the scandalous English singer May Milton. At some point, the artist or his dealer cut down the canvas to remove her from the composition, perhaps because her shocking appearance made the work hard to sell. In any case, by 1914 the cut section had been reattached to the painting.
Toulouse-Lautrec portrayed a gloomy dance hall with a dowdy, lower-class clientele. While the animated figures arrayed frieze like across the top of the canvas suggest the pleasurable buzz of social interaction, they also possess a tawdry aspect. Isolated in the foreground are three impassive women and a man whose predatory demeanor suggests he is their pimp. We are intruding on a scene from the past - this scene, after all, was once in the eye of the artist.
This clear connection between the color red and prostitution is clearly seen in Toulouse-Lautrec’s 1892 poster, Reine de Joie, which originally advertised a novel by Victor Joze, a friend of the artist who lived nearby in Montmartre. Reine de Joie, meurs du demi-monde (translated as "Queen of Joy, or the World of Easy Virtue"), first published in Joze’s Montmartre-based magazine, le Fin de siécle, was part of an erotic series entitled 'The Social Menagerie' and detailed the activities of Parisian prostitutes. Who knew?
For this image, Vail Gogh copied a wood engraving from Honore Datimier's Drinkers, a parody on the four ages of man. The exaggerated figure types capture Daumier's characteristic humor and convey his sad message about the horrors of alcoholism. The greenish palette may well be an allusion to the notorious alcoholic drink absinthe. I always marvel at how van Gogh slathered the paint on, and how after a hundred years it hasn't cracked yet. As he developed his own radical style, Van Gogh applied paint more and more with a flexible palette knife rather than a brush.
For this image, On October 11, 1888, when Vincent van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo: "Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I see before me, I make more arbitrary use of color to express myself more forcefully." A few days later, he completed his first version of The Bedroom (Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum), an image that exemplifies this approach, reconciling decorative and expressive elements to novel effect. The Art Institute's canvas, executed by the artist in September 1889, is the second version of the composition (a third is in the Musée d'Orsay, Paris). It reminds me of the simple existence people lived long ago without t.v., the Internet, and jet travel.
Van Gogh's self-portrait's always seem to have that jangling energy about them. It's as if there are lines of force running out then back into the man himself. This picture reminds me that the man himself did not seem to live a happy existence, and sadly killed himself before knowing anything of the admiration and fame that would ultimately be his.